Hey everyone! These 10 days had some of the very best and very worst dishes. Lets break them down and more importantly, look at pasta pictures! The photo at the end is actually a slideshow (!!!) so make sure you check it out to see some behind the scenes shots!
These few days have also been kind of a milestone for me because I've hosted my biggest noodle night to date- I went to my bosses' house and taught their family and our work family how to make pasta at home. There were 9 of us, it went really well, and I hope to continue to share this experience with more and more people in the weeks (probably months) to come. So stay tuned for more info about that.
The Tastiest: Springtime Spaghetti
My mom used to make this a couple of times a summer when I was growing up, and when I saw that we were getting dill in our farmshare I knew I had to make it. It was as good as I remembered (yay!) but looking at the recipe, how could it not be?! There were copious amounts of butter, cream and cheese, yum.
The Most Exotic: Cocoa Carmelle filled with figs and caramelized onions
I have some BEAUTIFUL pasta cookbooks (I'm thinking about posting about them, we'll see) and one of them has this recipe. It always suggests an alternative dough/shape to swap, and when I saw that this one could be done with cocoa I had to give it a try. It wasn't sweet, it was just a little bitter, and it complimented the gorgonzola and fig flavors really well. This dish was awesome. It tasted good, it looked good, and it was new and exciting! win. win. win.
The Most Disappointing: Beet Linguine with farmshare leftovers.
Oh how the mighty have fallen. "You can't win them all" they say, and that phrase has never rung more true. We had leftover swiss chard, fennel, some pureed beets and some questionable sparkling wine in the fridge, so I thought- why not! lets make something. It was bitter, soapy and you could totally taste the bad wine. We couldn't even save it with cheese...
The Prettiest: Sundried tomato and chevre tortellini
My favorite pictures in the cookbook Flour + Water are of the women working in a pasta "lab" all making teeny-tiny tortellini. They're all wearing matching pink outfits, and making beautiful pastas; its kind of the dream. I wanted to make this shape, and see if I could possibly make them as small as the ones in the book. I was close and will probably try again, because they're just so fricken cute.
The one you could make tonight: Gnocchi with butter and parmesan
Garganelli are fancy ziti. Pesto is basically 5 ingredients. You. Can. Do. This.
You could totally get away with making just one of these things, or buying them both; either way, its hard to argue that pesto+pasta isn't a super easy dinner. Garganelli are really fun to make, they are sheets of pasta cut into squares, then rolled around a dowel (honestly you could probably use a pencil) onto a textured surface (or not if you want smooth ones). The textured surface is great because it really helps grab the sauce, and you could use anything that the pasta dough wouldn't stick too, so think natural surfaces (like a sushi matt for example) that have a fun texture!
Here is my favorite infographic for pesto. It isn't the prettiest, but it is one of the most straightforward. I rarely follow recipes for pesto, and just grab handfuls of whatever greens I have floating around. My one warning would be to go easy on the raw garlic, you can always add more but once you go overboard its hard to go back
http://www.coit.com/blog/pesto-inforgraphic
Here are some of my favorite pictures from these 10 days, to see photos of all 10 finished dishes check out this link to my #100daysofpastafresca on instagram!
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